Alexander

Director Oliver Stone’s biography of the third-century-B.C. conqueror (written by Stone, Christopher Kyle and Laeta Kalogridis) is impressive to look at, recreating the ancient world with lived-in realism (the scenes in Babylon are breathtaking), and Stone gets his facts reasonably straight. But dramatically, the movie is an absolute mess, with a clumsy flashback-and-flash-forward structure; a babbling narration spoken by Anthony Hopkins; and stilted, incomprehensible dialogue that often descends into absolute gibberish (the actors’ thick Irish brogues don’t help). Colin Farrell (for some odd reason) plays the ambitious Alexander as a sniveling crybaby, while Angelina Jolie (as his conniving mother, Olympias) camps it up with a Boris-and-Natasha accent. Val Kilmer comes off best as Philip II of Macedon.